iPad Mini for Educators and Parents

SHAILAon November 30, 2012

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Earlier this year, Apple’s CEO, 'Tim Cook' spoke about selling a million iPads to schoolsduring the last quarter of 2012. And while launching the iPad Mini, he mentioned that 2500 classrooms in US were using iPads. Apple has enjoyed tremendous with the adoption of iPads in education. Nearly every state in the US has one or more mobile learning projects in pilot or wide deployment. The launch of the iPad Mini is only likely to accelerate this adoption.

What Makes the iPad Mini an Educator’s Delight

Educators approve its very size. Measuring just 7.87” it’s very easy for students to carry it around in a pocket or school bag and hold it in a single hand for a long duration. Being smaller in size also means 2 square inches less of backlight, which makes it easier on a student’s eye enabling longer reading times.

Its screen is condensed, yet the 275,000 apps that work on iPad work well on this, too, without any distortion. The current version of iPad Mini’s lack of a retina display, though disappointing to some, lengthens its battery life to 10 hours, almost an entire working day. And while on standby mode, it can go for days without a recharge.

Apple has offered educational institutions a discounted price on purchase of 10 packs of iPad Mini to help distribution among students. Studies show that the initial investment can soon be recovered from savings on textbooks and other educational printed materials.

Apple’s iPad Mini with its light weight, sturdiness, near immunity to malware and 10 hour battery life is thus a high utility educational gadget.

However, the greatest advantage of iPad Mini lies in its entailment to custom design instructional content and as an Internet reference tool. Several school districts are investing in creating customized content that is made available to students. Vail School District in Arizona is building an online library of such home-grown content that is then shared with other school districts that are part of the Beyond Texbooks initiative. While this is a departure from standardized textbooks purchased from a textbook company, advocates of the approach argue that content created at the local level by teachers adhere to the curriculum standards and align with the approach, style and requirements of the teacher and student more closely.

iPad Mini - A Parent’s Delight Too!

Parents revel in their children’s joy and children enjoy the iPad Mini as well. The A5 Dual Core Chip and the same screen resolution as the iPad2 (1024x768) renders games beautifully.

The ‘iSight’ camera with 1080 HD video recording, tap to focus, face detection, makes it almost better than a regular iPad since it is smaller making it easy to manoeuvre.

Its craftsmanship is beautiful too. The 4:3 displays makes for easy viewing and add this to its small size, iPad Mini is preferred over others for web browsing, social networking and general use. Of course we need to throw in a shameless plug here for our own Mobicip Safe Browser; a popular app for internet filtering and parental controls on the iPad, is now also available for the iPad mini.